Holder Fiscal Year 2011 Travel Cost More Than $1.45 Million

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder
took 62 out-of-town trips in fiscal year 2011 at a cost of at
least $1.45 million, according to a set of disclosures sent to
Bloomberg News.

Holder’s travel during the period included an April 2011
trip to Las Vegas, marked business and personal, that cost
$46,358. Nine other trips, including visits to Martha’s
Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Miami, were labeled “personal,”
and cost a combined $169,502. He took an $83,002 flight to
Krakow, Poland, to attend the G-6 summit.

As attorney general, Holder is a “required use” official
who is compelled by executive order to use government aircraft
for all travel while in office due to “security and
communications needs,” according to a February 2013 U.S.
Government Accountability Office report.

For personal trips, Holder is required to reimburse the
government for the equivalent commercial coach fare, which is
often much less than the total trip costs, the GAO said.

FBI Chief

Mueller’s 25 trips out of town for the period cost about
$1.25 million, including a business swing through China,
Indonesia and Hong Kong that totaled $212,283, including per
diems. His records also included a personal trip to San
Francisco that cost $95,364. The FBI said the director
reimbursed the government for a coach fare ticket for the trip.
Mueller disclosed his travel records to Bloomberg in April.

Holder got to most of his destinations on the Federal
Bureau of Investigation’s Gulfstream V which, according to GAO,
has a flight range of over 6,000 miles, allowing nonstop flights
all the way from Washington to Afghanistan.

A Gulfstream V flight to New York on November 13, 2010,
cost $15,894. The reimbursement rate was $420.80, according to
GAO.

Bloomberg News last year requested the details and costs of
out-of-town travel for the heads of 57 major departments in the
year ended Sept. 30, 2011, testing President Barack Obama’s
pledge to run the most open government in history.

1-Year Delay

Holder has called speedy responses to public records
requests an “essential component” of a transparent government.

Yet it took Holder, whose Justice Department is responsible
for monitoring federal compliance with the Freedom of
Information Act, more than a year to satisfy the open-records
request for his travel records for fiscal 2011.

The GAO report gave aggregate numbers for Holder’s travel
without specifying all the locations and the costs.

The Justice Department had posted incomplete records of
Holder’s daily schedule since 2009 on its website, without
revealing travel costs for any period.

On July 3, the agency’s Justice Management Division issued
a CD to Bloomberg listing 51 out-of-town trips Holder took
during fiscal 2011.

The vouchers didn’t include travel costs. The department
sent those a day later as Bloomberg prepared a story focusing on
the AG’s lack of compliance with the law.

“The department treats these records requests as an
important priority, and always approaches them with a
presumption of openness,” Melanie Ann Pustay, the director of
the Office of Information Policy, a division within the Justice
Department, said in an e-mail.

The delay in responding to the filings “sets a very bad
example for the rest of the government,” said Patrice
McDermott, executive director for Open the Government.org, a
group that advocates for transparent government. She said it was
“shocking” that the Justice Department took a year to respond
to “what seems like a pretty reasonable request.”